of her mind the hateful things Hannah Heath had said,
and reproaching herself for what seemed to her her unseemly feeling toward
David, who loved another and could never love her. It was not a part of
her life-dream to love one who belonged to another. Yet her heart was his
and she was beginning to know that everything belonging to him was dear to
her. She went and sat in his place at the table, she touched with
tenderness the books upon his desk that he had used before he went away,
she went up to his room and laid her lips for one precious daring instant
upon his pillow, and then drew back with wildly beating heart ashamed of
her emotion. She knelt beside his bed and prayed: "Oh, God, I love him, I
love him! I cannot help it!" as if she would apologize for herself, and
then she hugged the thought of her love to herself, feeling its sweet pain
drift through her like some delicious agony. Her love had come through
sorrow to her, and was not as she would have had it could she have chosen.
It brought no ray of happy hope for the future, save just the happiness of
loving in secret, and of doing for the object loved, with no thought of a
returned affection.

Then she went slowly down the stairs, trying to think how it would seem
when David came back. He had been so long gone that it seemed as if
perhaps he might never return. She felt that it had been no part of the
spirit of her contract with David that she should render to him this wild
sweet love that he had expected Kate to give. He had not wanted it. He had
only wanted a wife in name.

Then the color would sweep over her face in a crimson drift and leave it
painfully white, and she would glide to the piano like a ghost of her
former self and play some sad sweet strain, and sometimes sing.

She had no heart for her dear old woods in these days. She had tried it
one day in spring; slipped over the back fence and away through the
ploughed field where the sea of silver oats had surged, and up to the
hillside and the woods; but she was so reminded of David that it only
brought heart aches and tears. She wondered if it was because she was
getting old that the hillside did not seem so joyous now, and she did not
care to look up into the sky just for the pure joy of sky and air and
clouds, nor to listen to the branches whisper to the robins nesting. She
stooped and picked a great handful of spring beauties, but they did not
seem to give her pleasure, and by and by she dropped